The Lost Dreams of Bert DeLeeuw

The Lost Dreams of Bert DeLeeuw

Editor's Note: Ten years ago
today, May 2, 2000, my wife Lina Newhouser
asked if Common Dreams would reprint this Washington Post article on the 10th
anniversary of Bert's death. And we did.

Bert was Lina's first husband and the
father of our now 20-year-old daughter, Chloe. Lina was committed to
keeping Bert's memory, and life story, alive. Now, Lina is gone too. But
I'm sure that she would have asked that we reprint this again today --
the 20th anniversary. So I am.

Craig Brown

Published on Sunday, November 18, 1990 by the
Washington Post

The Lost Dreams of Bert DeLeeuw

Requiem for a Radical

He
was the essential Washington activist, organizing everything from
welfare rights protests to the Barry Commoner campaign. Then, still
trying to change the world, he headed back to the land - and toward a
fate no idealism could prepare him for.

The pathologist testified that the blast entered at the
victim's right posterior flank, not dead center in his back, as was
commonly thought by the people of Walker Township. The weapon was an
"over-and-under." Over-and-under is gun lingo for a rifle-shotgun
combination, which is to say a .222 rifle mounted atop a 20-gauge.
Hunters often use this model when going for turkey, although some like
it for deer. The targetlike wound, measuring roughly 14 centimeters in
diameter, formed a very distinctive pattern of concentric circles -- a
kind of smooth, horrid pebbling. Although there was probably never any
real chance of survival, surgeons at J.C. Blair Memorial Hospital
labored furiously to remove the pellets for close to two hours.

Bert Jay DeLeeuw was pronounced dead at 7:21 p.m.

A life was gone at 44.

It was an explosion that still reverberates, and not just in the
closed-in blue-green and whale-humped valleys of Huntingdon County, Pa.

It's a tale about dogs, only it's not about dogs.

It's about a person's lifelong search for meaning and community, and
the place where that search finally led him. It's about how we take our
fate with us. It's about changing the externals of your life without
perhaps changing the essentials of your life. It's about neighbors in
bucolic America gone fatally wrong. It's about urban values against
rural values. It's about the left against the right. It's about lives
seeming to go somewhere and other lives (right across the macadam)
seeming to go nowhere. It's about all those unexplained or unknown or
too-complicated forces in the dark tunnels of a human heart that can
suddenly, on the wrong day in the wrong rage in the wrong solstice, take
an ugly turn into homicide.

But this is trying to tell the thing in the abstract.

Let it start with the shattering sound itself.

Which happened right about here, on the other side of this
leaning fence post, in this narrow patch of green along this bowered
lane, where the squash and zucchini have now long since passed their
summer fulfillment. Last May 2, when Bert DeLeeuw was shot in the back
by his neighbor, shot in the back at close range by a man who'd attended
his wedding a year before, who'd been a guest in his home the previous
New Year's, there was no squash or zucchini or any other kind of organic
fulfillment in this boxlike strip of rich Pennsylvania earth, only the
promise of it, just the freshly worked loamy soil of Blue Moon Farm off
the Hartslog Valley Road.

Setting out new plants in mud-luscious spring, after winter has been
wrestled to the ground, is one of a farmer's nearly indescribable joys.
In this case the farmer had been a farmer only five seasons. Once, he'd
been a city man, a Washington, D.C., man, known not for the beauty of
his lettuce but for the zeal of his political organizing.

But we'll come to that.

The skeleton of the shooting, according to state police records and
court transcripts and interviews and other sources, is as follows: About
5:30 on the afternoon of the 2nd, 68-year-old Bill Robb -- whose house
is just across the road from the DeLeeuw place -- eased up in a burgundy
sedan. Three other people were on their knees, working in the field
with DeLeeuw -- his wife, Lina,
and two out-of-state college-age farmhands named Sally White and Bob
Weinswig. Bill Robb, native to these environs, had been on the DeLeeuw
(pronounced de-LOO) property earlier that day, shortly before lunch.
He'd been complaining once again and making not-so-veiled threats about
the seven or eight loose-running dogs the DeLeeuws owned. He'd been
glowering about how these dogs were running in packs onto his land, were
scaring his grandchildren, were spooking his horses, were causing a
total distraction and disruption in his life. He had a book about state
game laws, and he'd been waving it. He'd been mumbling many things. He
hadn't spoken to Bert DeLeeuw on that earlier visit, but had instructed
one of the young farmhands to pass along a message to DeLeeuw that he
had just 48 hours to do something.

Before he'd left, Robb had told the farmhand that he'd served his
country, and that Bert DeLeeuw had done everything not to serve his
country. He'd also said something about "maybe shooting the dogs too."

Now, though, it was late afternoon that same day, May 2, and the
neighbor had shown up again at Blue Moon Farm.

On the stand at the preliminary hearing (it was held
three weeks later), one of the three eyewitnesses testified that, in the
penultimate seconds before the gun went off, he heard Robb -- who had
the weapon up to his shoulder and was squinting down its barrel for
maybe as much as 10 beats -- say, "I'm really sorry I have to make Chloe
fatherless."

Chloe DeLeeuw, Bert DeLeeuw and Lina
Newhouser's only child, was not quite 7 months old at that moment.
She was up in the main house being tended to by a grandparent. The crack
from Bill Robb's .222-20 gauge wasn't heard up there.

"He was just pointing it at Bert," testified Bob Weinswig. "And then
Bert just kind of -- Bert turned around, sort of turned, and just as he
turned, not to walk away or anything. It was just like he kind of knew.
Like just as he turned around, Bill shot him in the back and Bert kind
of went, you know, down . . ."

Many weeks later, the defendant himself, held in the county jail
without bail, would vehemently insist to this reporter that the whole
thing had been an accident, that there had been lots of arguing back and
forth about the dogs in those final minutes, and that he, Robb, had
fired off to the side to scare hell out of his neighbor, who'd been
making his own threats and threatening moves, and that DeLeeuw just
stepped into the shot.

This is known: Lina Newhouser is the one who careened her husband to
town in their white Datsun pickup, a pickup still bearing a blue sticker
on its dented bumper: "FARMS NOT ARMS." Lina Newhouser is the one who
was standing perhaps four or five feet away when her husband -- he was
on his feet by then -- turned and took a sidelong step or maybe two
steps and then seemed to go lurching downward, almost in slow motion,
into the squash plantings.

Lina Newhouser -- who is from New Orleans, and is 39, and is a single
parent now -- is the one who screamed in the aftermath for George
William Robb to get the hell off her property; who ran to the truck and
got the watering tank off; who pulled and dragged and tried to lift the
crumpled, bleeding form; who, along with one of the two farmhands, got
Bert -- upside down, as it turned out -- into the cab of the pickup; who
kept repeating, like a mantra in some fantastic dream, "This is really a
bad joke. This is really a bad joke."

The funeral service was held at Blue Moon Farm four days later. By
then most of the obituaries, local and otherwise, had appeared. Many
made mention of the victim's well-to-do beginnings in suburban New
Jersey; of his thoughts of the ministry during college in Michigan; of
his turn toward social work and community organizing in graduate school
in the late '60s; of his decade and a half spent in Washington working
for such causes and minority groups as the National Welfare Rights
Organization and the Movement for Economic Justice. There was mention of
DeLeeuw's several marriages; of his three or four years as a
self-employed carpenter after he'd given up working in electoral
politics but before he'd left Washington; of his earlier roles in three
presidential campaigns: George McGovern's ('72), Fred Harris's ('76),
Barry Commoner's ('80). There was mention of some of the more celebrated
demonstrations and protests and "actions" he'd participated in in his
time -- that May 1970 sit-in at the office of Health, Education and
Welfare Secretary Robert Finch, for instance. That had been one of
Bert's best arrests. Photos had gone out on all the national wires.

"When you go to jail, it's such a clear, crisp definition of your
belief in the issue," Bert DeLeeuw told a Washington interviewer in
1984, though that quote didn't appear in the death stories.

Actually, the people of Walker Township in Huntingdon County, Pa.,
were a little stunned to learn how their neighbor had done so many
things in so short a life. They'd known him in an entirely different
context.

* * *

The Robin Hood Hotel

It was a brick row house and it stood at 1735 T St. NW above Dupont
Circle and there were roses growing in the front yard, and in its own
way in its own day to its own kind of '70s Washington player it was as
famous a place as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It was a haven for anyone to the left who had a cause, the farther to
the left the better.

New Year's parties there were legend. Didn't need a tie, didn't need a
fixed address: Come to the Robin Hood Hotel, where Bert and Madeleine
lived, where a movement kicked off its shoes. Come at 11 and go home at
11 a day later if you like.

The place took its name from one of the great welfare rights slogans
of the early '70s: "Robin Hood was right." There always seemed to be
somebody sleeping on the sofa who was just in from Berkeley or Ann Arbor
or Little Rock.

"He used to make us omelets when we came over -- and hamburger pies,"
remembers one old couch-sleeper at the Robin Hood. "The hamburger pies
took up the entire skillet and had cheese and peppers and raisins and
cashew nuts. He'd bring the frying pan over to the table and cut you up a
wedge. I think sometimes I remember him more for food than I do for
causes. The man loved a party."

There was good classical piano in this house. There was good
marijuana in this house. There was good Ping-Pong in the basement of
this house.

Bert DeLeeuw and Madeleine Adamson -- who was his second wife and
today lives in Baltimore and who is still an organizer for causes on the
left -- played host to parties at the Robin Hood Hotel from the
mid-'70s to the mid-'80s. When they bought the house, the price was
$29,500. When they put it up for sale, their lives and mutual love
having gone separate ways, the asking price was $175,000. The space
between those two figures seems almost a time line between what a city
was, when an activist felt at home here, and what a city became, or
seemed to become, when an activist called the town quits and sought to
reinvent his life, though not his values, in the shadow of Tussey
Mountain in rural Pennsylvania on a broken-down piece of property that
offered 100 acres of woods, 50 acres of tillable fields, good pasture
land, two cold streams and some very promising structures.

All you had to have was the zeal. That's one of the things people
always tell you now about Bert DeLeeuw: He could go at a new idea like a
man killing snakes. Once he'd refound the dream, there was one gear:
fast forward.

When the Robin Hood Hotel closed its doors in early 1984, when two
people were closing up their marriage as well, a party was held.
Champagne was uncorked. The food, as always, was something. The printed
invitations had proclaimed the event "The end of an era," and maybe it
was. The specially made buttons announced that it was the end of an era
too. What would the protest movement of the '60s and '70s have been
without buttons? Every action always had to have a button. Not to
mention media: The Post's Style section did a major story.

Bert DeLeeuw made a fine toast at the close-down of the Robin Hood
and of his second marriage. He was already with his new love, Lina, just
as Madeleine, his ex, was already with hers. There was a sense of
separate peace that day, and maybe not just among the divorcing two.

"Living stripped of all its facets . . . reduces down to
relationships," he said in his toast. "That's why this house has been so
important to me. We've had parties, we've had meetings, we've had block
associations." And then he said, "I am a socialist. It's because
society is based on collectivity and interpersonal relationships that
capitalism will fail."

Two years later, almost to the day, Bert DeLeeuw and Lina Newhouser,
proprietors of a struggling organic farm in central Pennsylvania, wrote a
holiday letter to their family and friends and old common causers back
in Washington. It was supposed to be a New Year's message, but
characteristically got sent out a bit late -- near the end of January.

"Our life here as producers -- getting our hands dirty and our backs
tired -- is one we look forward to, as it places us squarely in the
heart of our new community and provides a context for our political,
cultural, and intellectual aspirations and activities," the pilgrim
farmers wrote. "We especially hope that, over the distances that
separate us, we will be able to share in the struggle to create
societies that honor peace over militarism, liberation over oppression,
collective enterprise over greed."

One of the co-signers of the letter would have a little over four
years and four months to pursue that dream . . . From court transcripts
at the preliminary hearing:

Q. I'm curious. You heard a horse. Did you see a horse?

A. No, no, no. And Bert said that Mr. Robb has a tape recording of
his horse which he plays down the road just to bother the dogs. They
were all barking and we told them to calm down and stop. We kept working
and we heard a car coming down the road and it was Mr. Robb's red
Oldsmobile. And he said to me, he said, did you give Mr. DeLeeuw my
message. I said -- I mean, Mr. DeLeeuw was, you know, 20 feet away from
me. Heard him say this. I just didn't really understand the point of
responding. And so he pulled up his car a little more and he was still
in it and he's like, Mr. DeLeeuw, and he said that a couple times, you
know, Mr. DeLeeuw. And, you know, Bert's sitting there trying to work
because I guess Mr. Robb would come by quite often. We're all sitting
there trying to work and he's saying stuff like, you don't respect me.
You don't respect anyone. He's like, that's not true, Bert said. You
know, I do respect you, you know, and he's still working in the ground
and --

Q. Is Mr. Robb still in the car?

A. Yeah. Mr. Robb's still in the car. And then he said stuff like,
about the dogs; said you made a big mistake. And he started getting out
of the car and he pulled out this big shotgun, and he was holding it
down at his waist and he was pointing it at him.

Q. Pointing it at who?

A. It was just kind of down there. He was standing out overlooking
the field and he says some stuff about making a big mistake and he just
kept kind of say- ing the same stuff over. Bert and Lina were like,
Bill, put the gun away. He {DeLeeuw} kind of stood up now because he
{Robb} pulled out this gun. He kept saying, Bill, put the gun away. Put
the gun away, Bill.

* * *

"He was dead already," the small, muscular woman is saying.

"I think he died immediately, within seconds. They spent a long time
trying to revive him, you know."

And then, with a kind of perfect empty brightness, as if to cover all
the horror she is feeling, Lina Newhouser says, "I said to myself,
'Gee, I've got to hurry and get Bert to the hospital.' So I just stuffed
him in and drove away."

She's bouncing her sleepy-eyed yellow-haired baby daughter on her
knee. Chloe DeLeeuw's just up from a nap.

A moment ago she had said, "Well, in a sense, I think his parents are
surviving in the same way I am, by keeping extremely busy. Just bring
it up and watch them, you know, shatter before your eyes."

She has tawny skin and short-cropped black hair. There seems
something impish and elfin and ingenue-ish about her -- for all her
toughness and pain and savvy, for all the bloodshot in her eyes this
afternoon. She's an artist by education and sensibility, though it was
always art that sought to intersect at the angle of radical, or at least
liberal, politics. She once worked, in Washington and other places, for
an activist group known as ACORN: the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now.

She once opened an exhibit in a laundromat in Hoboken, N.J. It was a
series of pieces about clothes on clotheslines.

People tell you now that Lina Newhouser expanded Bert's horizons,
made him less inclined to see the world through political eyeglasses.
People also tell you she made the last several years of his life among
the happiest he'd ever known. Fatherhood must have helped in this too,
though the fatherhood was so short-lived.

"I started spending time with him in 1980," she is saying. "We were
both coming out of other relationships. His second marriage was starting
to break up. He hired me to work at Citizens' Party."

On the wall behind her head in this messy but still somehow elegant
Civil War-era split-log farmhouse is a large poster. It says "VOTE
CITIZENS' PARTY 1980" and it's inscribed, "For Bert -- who made the
obviously impossible not only possible but worth doing." Barry Commoner
wrote the words. Bert DeLeeuw managed the Commoner campaign on the road,
disastrous as that campaign was, at least at the polling booth. Bert
was the keeper of the body, was the one you had to talk to first. For
the last weeks of the campaign, when everybody seemed mostly to be going
through motions, the campaign manager had gone out and bought a
cream-colored linen suit: class. He may have never had any money in his
life, but DeLeeuw had style and class. People say he knew wines the way
baseball people know box scores. He was the original counterculture man
with the gourmet's palate.

Today Lina Newhouser is wearing khaki shorts, with woolen sweat socks
rolled down around her ankles. The measure of her anger seems the
precise measure of her fragility. This is the second visit to the farm
by a reporter in a week's time, and in the first, Lina -- you pronounce
it Line-uh -- had been able to speak only around the events of May 2,
1990, not really of them. This visit you get a sense of her odd eggshell
toughness just in the way she shakes hands: When it's time to let go,
she doesn't. And yet in her need to hang on, there also seems a great
strength.

"We bought it on the summer solstice," she is saying. "There was a
blue moon that year. We just liked the name. It makes you think of
different things. 'Blue Moon . . . ' " She breaks off the tiniest hum.

On the inside of a cabinet on the far wall are some 8x10 photos: of a
shag-haired and wire-rimmed youthful-looking man being dragged toward a
District of Columbia paddy wagon; of a brown-lung protest, complete
with signs and bullhorns; of a clean-cut Jersey kid from the '50s
getting a ballplayer's autograph in Yankee Stadium. There's also a
picture of a former president with this under it: "Best wishes to Bert
DeLeeuw. Jimmy Carter."

All of it must be so long ago -- anything past May 2, 1990, must be
so long ago. Today, Lina and the help were out in the fields picking by
7:30. They used baskets and boxes and got lettuce, eggplant, onions,
kale, collard greens. They worked straight through till lunch at 2. Some
of the harvested produce will be sold Friday at the Huntingdon farmers
market (which Bert and Lina helped establish); other of it will be put
on a co-op truck and taken down to Washington, 3 1/2 hours distant, and
delivered to tony restaurants and to organically minded Georgetowners.
The DeLeeuw farm is part of a co-op called the Tuscarora Organic
Growers.

"We're having, ironically, a good season," she says. "The weather has
been very cooperative. That's one of the sad, sad ironies. We were
getting everything in place without any more . . . large capital
expenditures."

This is the least reference to a hard ongoing fact: She and her
husband always had to scrabble for seed money -- literally for seed
money. Everything was on the come. That's how farming is, especially
when you're doing it organically and just starting out and have put
nearly everything you have into the purchase of the property. Bert and
Lina borrowed from banks, from family, from farm credit unions. The
question was always: Can we last another two or three or four seasons
until we turn the corner?

"We would have turned the corner," she says.

Her head is wrapped in a faded pink kerchief. On the back of her
T-shirt is the word "Unbelizable," which has something to do with the
Central American country bordering the Caribbean where two people fast
in love once spent six months, bronzing their bodies, snorkeling and
fishing for snappers and grunts. The Belize interlude was shortly before
the flight from urbanity, when Bert DeLeeuw and Lina Newhouser were
thinking hard about what the next step would be. Ronald Reagan's America
wasn't their America. There didn't seem to be much point anymore to the
kind of work they'd been doing, at least no longer any point to doing
it in Washington. "Whither the left?" you might describe their mind-set
then. Whither Bert and Lina? The answer turned out to be Blue Moon Farm,
which wasn't even a name, just a gleam, sitting across from the rolling
property of Bill Robb, a onetime letter carrier they would end up
knowing well, and being quite neighborly with, for a time.

Again, quoting from that first New Year's letter in the proud, new,
dilapidated home: "Here on the farm we've been busy fixing the barn,
rebuilding the spring house, canning fruits and vegetables, painting,
clearing the pear orchard, weeding the garden, installing a heating
system (wood furnace), and tearing down old plaster walls to expose the
log walls of our house."

"We weren't dropping out," Lina is saying now. "It's much more
complex than that. Bert wasn't burned out. He was definitely shifting
gears, that's true. He was definitely tired. He didn't want to do
electoral politics anymore. I think he was trying to rethink the whole
idea of community. What we wanted in a community. In all his organizing,
he was working on the same idea. Empowering people."

If he'd left the old life with any sense of embitterment, she never
knew it, she says.

Bert loved taking first-time visitors from the city out into the
fields. He'd rhapsodize on his plantings, hell, he'd practically bore
people to tears with the minutiae of his new life. It was the same as
organizing, he'd tell his friends: impossible hours, endless lists, a
need to stay on top of a thousand details. Only here you got tangible
results.

Sometimes, when guests from Manhattan or Washington were at the farm
and had met the neighbor from across the road, they'd ask Bert after the
old guy was gone, "What's his problem, exactly?" And Bert's answer
would surprisingly be something like this: "Don't be fooled. He's a lot
smarter than you think. He went to college. He'll quote you the
Constitution."

Bert enjoyed having Bill Robb over, Lina says. That's what you do
with neighbors. Sure, the guy talked a lot. For that matter, Bert talked
a lot.

They dug their compost. They recycled their glass. They refused
plastic bags at the supermarket. They joined a film series at the local
college. A season later, Lina, without her husband knowing it, took
small amounts from their market cash box each week, and when November
came round, she took the money into town and bought two tickets on
Amtrak for a Christmastime tour across the country.

Why weren't we always living this life? two people asked themselves.
In almost no time, it seemed, Bert had become a kind of spokesperson for
the township. Once, when someone asked Bert, the city boy, how it was
he thought he could turn himself into an organic farmer, he replied,
"Why, it never really occurred to us we couldn't do this."

"Bert served as a township supervisor here," she is saying. "He was
very proud of that. I think it paid a hundred and twenty-five a month."

And then: "He liked being a leader up here. He was accepted here. We
were accepted here."

Although they were together on and off for about the last 10 years of
Bert's life, and together permanently from the middle of the decade,
the two decided to marry only at the end of the '80s. The wedding date
was May 28, 1989.

"Partly, I suppose, because we were going to have a baby," she says.
"It's hard to put into words. Partly because it was right for this time
in our lives. And then, too, right for our place in this community."

It was an outdoor wedding, with a pitched tent and wonderful food.
There was an air of community picnic. The groom was open-collared and
had his hair neatly brushed and he wore a batik patchwork vest. His
bride looked like the prettiest girl in some hilltop Mexican village.
One of the guests who made a toast that day -- it rambled on, something
to do with the pleasures of taking drink on the occasion of two people
getting hitched -- was the neighbor from across the road. Bill Robb came
to the party with a suit and a cane. He was very jovial. He danced with
several young female guests up from the city. "Oh, are you one of their
commie friends?" he joshed to one of his dance partners, trying to
waltz.

Blue veins are sawing brightly up Lina Newhouser's neck. She is
bobbing her child. Her face is cracking.

And she says: "These dogs never attacked a person. Yes, they could
attack other dogs if they came up, or could bark like crazy at people
riding horses. Dogs do that. We had dogs in the first place to keep off
the deer from eating our vegetables."

And she says: "I mean, why didn't he shoot the dogs if he had to
shoot something? Of course. That would have been too rational."

And she says: "We cut Bill Robb a lot of slack over the years. We
tried to respect what there was to respect about Bill Robb."

And she says, still bobbing her child, chewing at her lip, nodding
tightly, crying now in spite of herself: "Yes. Yes. Pretty angry, I'm
pretty damn angry."

The last thing Lina Newhouser says she can remember hearing the
neighbor man say before he pulled the trigger was, "Sorry about that,
old buddy."

Old buddy. People in this township and in this county tell you that
is a pure Robbism . . . Bill Robb had been drinking that day, though how
hard isn't precisely known. Before the shooting, according to a state
trooper's lengthy reports, Robb said to his wife, Vera, "I guess I'll
have to go up there and shoot either Bert or the dogs." When Vera tried
to remonstrate with him, she later told authorities, he pointed a
revolver at her head.

After the shooting, the state troopers came for him at his place.
Vera was out in the yard, hiding behind a tree. The accused man emerged,
with small unsteadiness, in his suspenders and baggy pants and slight
growth of Wednesday whisker and said, according to arresting officer
Wayne Gibson, "I shot him. I killed Bert." Bill Robb would spout many
things in the next several hours. Robb's affect seemed all wrong that
night, bizarrely out of place -- in the squad car on the way to the
arraignment before the district magistrate; in the fingerprinting
session; during the alcohol testing period. According to the troopers
and the district attorney and even the man appointed public defender in
this case, Robb just gibbered on. They couldn't shut him up. It almost
seemed as if he loved the attention he was suddenly getting. Far from
showing remorse or fear or confusion, Robb appeared wholly satisfied
with what his over-and-under had accomplished. That, or not really
comprehending of it. At one point, he said to the arresting officer, "I
wanted to shoot him with something that would do the job."

* * *

Snapshots Of A Life

Bert Jay DeLeeuw is born on August 16, 1945, in a Hackensack, N.J.,
hospital. His parents, Bert Sr. and Evelyn -- thrifty, hard-working,
churchgoing, Dutch-descended -- derive his middle name from the
just-celebrated V-J Day. He is the firstborn in a family of four
children, each child with a distinctly -- almost radically -- different
personality. For instance, the next to come along in this family is
Bill. Bert and Bill are just 17 months apart. Bill DeLeeuw grows up with
the strangest knack for being able to rub 50 cents in his palms and
make it come out 5 bucks -- while his older brother always has trouble
just finding the 50 cents. Bill DeLeeuw becomes a Nixon Republican, a
San Diego real estate baron, a sailing partner of Dennis Conner, a mogul
estimated to be worth $30-odd million -- conservatively speaking.

These two oldest boys will never be close -- and for a time will seem
to despise each other's values -- but they are always fierce tennis and
Ping-Pong rivals. (In the early evening hours of May 2, Bill DeLeeuw is
the one who must break the news to his aging parents. The parents are
in Las Vegas, making their way back across the country after a winter in
California. The second son flies to Nevada, finds his folks in the
lobby of Circus Circus. "Let's go upstairs, I have something to tell
you," he says.)

The head of this nuclear Jersey family of six, Bert DeLeeuw Sr., is a
small, practical, modest, affable and self-taught American businessman.
Later in life he will be known as "Mr. Fixit" for his willingness to
help repair his neighbors' leaky faucets and fouled spark plugs. Bert
Sr. is co-owner of a Bergen County machine plant. After the war, he and a
few friends buy an old building and fill it with junk parts. Over the
next decade they turn a shop into a plant. Rochelle Plastic Mold Co.
makes precision steel molds for plastic parts. Bert Sr. works at the
plant six days a week, but never on Sunday. Sunday is the Lord's day.
This is a Christian Reformed family, and that is sacred.

A reporter brings up the word "community." Evelyn DeLeeuw says, "Yes,
and I can tell you where it came from. It came from an organized family
that always had their meals together. And, by the way, anybody was
welcome in this house."

Starting out in Rochelle Park, a less affluent area of Bergen County,
the DeLeeuws move to Wyckoff, more upscale. The DeLeeuws never flaunt
what they have; that wouldn't conform to their religious principles.
Bert Jr. attends Passaic Christian School, Eastern Christian Junior
High, Eastern Christian High. At all of these he is a leader and
achiever, especially at the last: captain of the tennis team, member of
the student council, runner on the cross-country squad. He seems
singularly uninterested in the world of commerce, in fact, seems
uninterested in money at all except as you must have it to live. This
seems not a rejection of his father so much as an embrace of his
paternal grandfather. Peter DeLeeuw, who'd arrived in America from
Holland at age 12 and never got higher than a school janitor, was known
all over this part of Jersey for his Christian humanitarian work. Peter
DeLeeuw, the old impecunious Dutchman, had a nonsensical rhyme: "There
was a man, they called him mad/ The more he gave, the more he had."

Summers, the DeLeeuws go to Green Pond, 50 minutes west of exurbia.
Green Pond is a long and skinny and crystal-clear spring-fed lake where
old wooden Chris-Crafts and Republican money lie at anchor. Originally a
Methodist camp, the pond has turned itself into a summer colony for
doctors and lawyers and wealthy funeral parlor owners. It's not the
richness or exclusivity of, say, Upper Saddle River, but it's private
and beautiful and family-oriented.

There are four red clay tennis courts at the Green Pond Yacht Club.
During summers, Bert Jr. gets a job as the club's teaching pro. Part of
his responsibility is maintaining the courts; he embraces this duty
almost religiously. Some days he's out as early as 6 a.m., rolling and
sweeping and putting the calcium down. Some nights he's still out at 10,
shining headlights on the playing surface to see what he's doing.

In 1963, which of course is the year JFK is assassinated in Dallas,
the eldest DeLeeuw son enrolls as a pre-seminarian at Calvin College in
Grand Rapids, Mich. He is thinking of going into the service of the
church, but by his second year he has decided that community organizing,
not the ministry, is his real vocation. "That's what I got out of my
religious back- ground," he'll tell a reporter profiling him in 1984. "
'The least of those among you.' That was the notion of what Christianity
was supposed to be about -- helping other people."

He majors in sociology, marries his high school sweetheart, relocates
to Ann Arbor. It's the fall of 1967, and Vietnam is no longer that tidy
little one-column firefight most of the early New Frontiersmen figured
it for. He enters the University of Michigan's graduate School of Social
Work. By now he has adopted his life's uniform: denim shirts and pants,
wire-rims, semi-disheveled hair, the occasional wrinkled corduroy coat.
His marriage is fraying at the edges, though his parents don't know
this.

He gets arrested in a campus protest -- the cause is long forgotten
-- and mails the gang in Jersey a picture of it. A pattern is forming.
Years hence this pattern will be defined by his second wife as "the
agitational response." Which is to say: Bert DeLeeuw enjoyed putting it
in their faces, whoever they were, letting them deal with it, whatever
it was. Not necessarily to be mean, mind you. But to get their
attention.

And yet this wasn't a loud or demonstrative or hubristic or showy
person, certainly not in these years.

Evelyn DeLeeuw: "I guess we could never really understand his
political thinking. We couldn't understand, for instance, why he wanted
to go off and get arrested. That seemed so foreign to us. After he was
living in Washington and working for the causes of civil rights and so
forth, he told us he couldn't really come up here anymore, that people
up here didn't understand him. But, you know, now I think that just
about everything he was doing down there in those years was religious."

Bert DeLeeuw Sr.: "He was certainly doing good work and all. But, I
don't know, it was as if he was doing the opposite of what we thought he
should be doing. I guess we just thought he'd never be able to make a
living at it. I guess it made us mad. I guess it made us anxious. I
guess we felt that Bert's work was, you know, kind of driving a wedge in
his marriage."

In 1968, the eldest son arranges to work as an intern in Washington,
D.C. It's the summer of Resurrection City and the Poor People's
Campaign, of Grant Park in Chicago. Bert meets a charismatic black man
named George Wiley. Wiley, head of the fledgling welfare rights movement
in America, is a world-class chemistry professor turned advocate of the
lowest sector of poor. He sees economic issues as the key to all civil
rights. He has one blinding insight: Bring the "ladies," which is to say
the welfare mothers themselves, smack into the middle of the movement.
That is, put up front what other black civil rights leaders think of as
absolutely the wrong images.

It's not altogether inaccurate to say that the tennis-playing
upper-middle-class kid from conservative white Bergen County, who has
somehow grafted onto himself his grandfather's conscience, fairly comes
to worship the black Washington laureate of mothers on welfare.

"We all wanted to raise hell," Bert will say in that same 1984
profile, looking back on the time when he first found his activist fire.
"There was just something about the times, I guess. We wanted to go out
and organize! We wanted to feel that we were going to do something
about the massive inequality in poor people versus non-poor people in
society."

Anyway, he returns to Michigan, completes his master's, comes back to
Washington the following summer to begin working full time for George
Wiley and the movement. Over the next years, there are many protests.
All those hard-to-describe organizing skills are being deftly acquired.
There's an extensive protest in Las Vegas that lasts six weeks; Sammy
Davis Jr. and Ralph Abernathy and Jane Fonda and other celebrities
arrive to help. Bert gets his pic in Life magazine.

Bert DeLeeuw, now George Wiley's most trusted aide, his second in
command, a kind of chief of staff to a movement, is becoming known far
and wide as the guy with the phone numbers. He can get Gloria Steinem.
If you have to get through to Jane Fonda, that's Bert. He can work
Washington. He can talk to the Hill, to lawyers, to the ladies. It's all
behind the scenes, which is not to say he's not capable of getting out
front with the bullhorn.

The first marriage dissolves. Madeleine Adamson, a beautiful student
at American University, has entered the picture. Madeleine turns up at
the National Welfare Rights Organization offices at 14th and H NW to
answer telephones and run a mimeo copier, and, well, love just follows.

In 1972, Bert takes time off from welfare rights work to help with
George McGovern's run for the presidency. Ever the idealist and
optimist, he writes long impassioned letters to his beloved -- who's
sojourning in Europe that fall -- telling her that McGovern is going to
get elected. "My batting average is not too good on these political
campaigns," DeLeeuw will say years later, "but my conscience is clear."

The marriage of Madeleine and Bert comes shortly after the '72
election. It's held at the AU chapel. The printed-up buttons proclaim:
"Legalize Madeleine and Bert." There's a big dinner at the Yenching
Palace on Connecticut Avenue. The house on T Street becomes the Robin
Hood Hotel. Bert always seems to be talking about "CDBGs": Community
Development Block Grants. That's the key, he thinks. He loves going to
Childe Harold and the Admiral Benbow and Food for Thought. One night, at
one or another of these places, he bulbs with another kind of CDBG:
Block T Street off so that the Metrobuses can't come down. Metrobuses
are an intrusion on his sense of community. His idea is that everybody
on his block will get out and human-barricade the street. It'll be a
kind of party. At length, there's a peaceful rerouting of the buses,
which is a disappointment in its own way.

Well, you get the picture: other causes, other electoral battles,
other jailings, other alienations, other protests -- by the score. Many
of these causes fail, at least if you're trying to tabulate results in a
won-lost column. A decade swims on. A man still has the capacity to
work like he's killing snakes. The charismatic George Wiley has now
drowned in a terrible accident on the Chesapeake Bay. Bert and
Madeleine, in their grief, throw themselves into a new organization
called the Movement for Economic Justice. The MEJ was George Wiley's
last dream. Bert tries to carry on Wiley's idea of an umbrella
organization that will bring together all the various strains and
subshoots of community groups working for the poor across America.

MEJ folds its tent in 1976. It's not so much a lack of funds as a
lack of harmony. Political organizing, especially on the left, is a very
egotistical business, and much of the ego and infighting seems to arise
from one cold fact: You're always dealing with an intangibility of
product. And besides, down deep, lefties know they're never going to
win. There are too many on the other side. Hence the internal turf wars.

Actually, the rise of ego is one of the things in these later years
of the '70s that people seem to be noticing about Bert DeLeeuw. But he
is far from an egomaniac. And he still keeps the old dreams intact, more
than you can say for some. They haven't made "The Big Chill" in
Hollywood yet, but the Big Chill tenor of the times is coming fast on
the inside.

Bert had been so certain that Fred Harris of Oklahoma had a real
chance at the presidency in '76. People say his defeat slowed him up
only momentarily.

The Commoner campaign of '80 comes and goes. Before the infighting
gets too unbearable, Bert serves as director of the Citizens' Party. He
isn't averse to stopping in at Green Pond with a klatch of Commoner
advance types who spill drinks on his parents' rug and run up large
cross-country bills on Bert and Evelyn's phone. This angers Bert and
Evelyn, but characteristically they never say enough's enough. He is
their son, maybe they don't really understand him, but he will always be
welcome.

After the Commoner campaign, exhausted, the eldest son turns to
self-employed carpentry. He's still living at the Robin Hood Hotel, but
he and Madeleine have drawn apart. It turns out that an apprentice
carpenter has amazing hand skills -- anybody who ever played across a
tennis net from him might have told you this. But now Bert puts in
kitchens with wondrous dexterity, builds beautiful cabinets, does the
grunt work of roofing. He has never made more than $12,000 in a single
year, and these days his political arguments come while he's waiting for
materials at the discount lumber yards. You wouldn't call him unhappy.
What you'd probably call him is in between. Waiting for the next step.

"It's all honest work," he'll later say of this period. "The one
thing I didn't want to do, and don't ever want to do, is sell my soul
for the sake of doing something."

In the early '80s, about to come over the top of 40 years old, Bert
Jay DeLeeuw eyes paper napkins with loathing, loves the LL Bean
catalogue, can still turn a piece of salmon into an eating experience.
And perhaps this could be said as well: A committed and perhaps too
idealistic son of the torn '60s has spent most of his grown-up life
trying to replicate -- possibly without even knowing -- the fundamental
decency and bonding of the home he had no other choice but to leave
behind . . . Bill Robb was still standing with his gun above the patch
alongside the lane as Lina and one of the farmhands tried to get Bert
into the pickup. Then the neighbor went over to his car and started up
the engine and drove down the lane, not toward his own house but toward
the DeLeeuw barns and farmhouse. He made a U-turn. He was on his way
back down the lane, still driving slowly, just as Lina pulled out across
the field. You could have almost called it comical: the two vehicles
meeting at that second. Robb slowed down even more, as if to give a lady
the right of way. Lina gunned the pickup on down the lane while Robb
went across the pavement to his own place.

* * *

Something people in Huntingdon County and elsewhere are very curious
about now is the extent of the dog squabble: How long did it go on? Lina
Newhouser says she isn't really sure herself, though she thinks several
weeks. For much of that time, she stresses, she was in the house,
tending Chloe. She didn't take part in this year's planting season
nearly as much as in other years. But in any case, the dog issue was
never something she and Bert were taking very seriously, she says. Yes,
it's true her husband had put shock collars on several of the dogs to
try to keep them on his property. He was aware there was a potential
problem. But, really, wasn't all this fuss and feather about the dogs
just Bill, his latest kick, blowing hard about something?

Bill Robb tested legally drunk the night he was picked up. But this
fact, when it got out, wasn't very surprising to to a lot of people in
Walker Township. There is one DWI conviction on Robb's record, though
people tell you now -- heck, the district attorney tells you -- it's a
little hard to believe there's only the one. What is absolutely
flattening to the people of the township is that this garrulous old man,
this former rural postman who had been in their midst all their lives,
this harmless blowhard whom you'd generally prefer to step across the
street from rather than having to stop and listen to, would have ever
turned up as a defendant in a criminal homicide case. Nobody pegged Bill
Robb for that role.

The district attorney of Huntingdon County, after studying the case,
thinks it's pretty much an open and shut instance of the ravages of
alcohol. His name is Stewart Kurtz. He's a lifelong Huntingdon boy --
and nobody's fool. He's lived in cities and likes the country better.
He's known Bill Robb practically as far back as he can remember. His
cousin Butch used to hunt out at Robb's place.

Kurtz believes the case is purely the result of Robb's drinking.
"Bill Robb is a drinker, and . . . he killed," Kurtz says. "I don't know
if atrophy applies. I do have indications of a personality change in
the previous six months leading up to this. He'd been behaving badly;
his personality seemed to be shifting to a semi-violent state. He was a
character, you know. Everybody knew him. He was a mail carrier. People
know mail carriers."

Kurtz doesn't particularly want to try this case; it involves a
native son, after all. But he'll try it, that is, if it should actually
come to trial, which is still something of an open question. A plea to a
lesser charge, say, murder in the third degree, may be worked out
between all parties -- which might also, as a side benefit, enable Lina
Newhouser to go forward with a wrongful death civil suit against the
Robb family. (Robb is reported to be holding a huge homeowner's
insurance policy; if he should be found guilty of premeditated
first-degree murder, the insurance company would in all probability balk
at paying.) Psychiatric evaluations of the defendant are now being
conducted by a doctor in Pittsburgh, although Kurtz emphasizes that
under Pennsylvania legal codes it would seem next to impossible for Robb
to be judged insane. Right now Robb is charged with criminal homicide,
an umbrella term in Pennsylvania that covers everything from murder one
down to involuntary manslaughter. The trial is currently scheduled for
the court term opening January 7.

Stew Kurtz feels that if his jury were being made up of people in
Walker Township, he could probably get a conviction inside of 30
minutes. The jury, however, will be drawn from other parts of the
county.

From a strictly courtroom standpoint, the DA feels this isn't a tough
case at all. "We have these eyewitnesses. Hell, you see him arrive. You
see him pull the gun, testify to his statements, you see him pull the
trigger." The outcome of the trial may turn on the question of specific
intent. Kurtz is a little concerned right now that the public defender
in the case might try to mount some kind of self-defense argument.

One of the explanations on the streets of Huntingdon -- "Welcome to
Huntingdon, Our Home, Our Town," says the sign when you come in -- is
that an old embittered man, a local butt, had gone off his cracker, and
that if it hadn't been Bert, it might have been his own wife or son or
daughter-in-law, and that indeed maybe Bert DeLeeuw became the victim by
proxy. It's as if in the absence of more hard fact, speculation has
become the form of solace.

Fred Gutshall, the public defender, is another home-grown boy, down
Mount Union way, also nobody's fool, and also a man who'd probably
rather have another assignment but isn't shrinking from this one. "I am a
little old-fashioned in that I believe a person is innocent until
proven guilty," he says. "Everyone has prejudged Mr. Robb. But he has
his right to his day in court like anybody else. You talk to Robb,
you'll hear a different story. Bert DeLeeuw had these dogs. There was a
conflict there."

Asked about all the talking Robb did after the shooting, Gutshall
says, "I personally feel he was in shock that night." Asked whether he
might use alcohol impairment as a defense, Gutshall replies, "That's
certainly possible. But alcohol itself is not a defense, never has been.
You can't say, 'My client was drunk.' That's just not a defense in
Pennsylvania."

There are 136 churches in Huntingdon County, and homicide isn't a
regular subject of the Sunday homily. And yet this oddity: Four homicide
cases, Robb's being the most celebrated, are now awaiting disposition
in the county. You'd have to go back to 1830 to beat that record, the
locals say . . . As soon as Robb got out of his car, Sally White, the
other young farmhand who'd come to Blue Moon for the '90 growing and
harvest season, began walking away. Sally got behind a tree. The dogs
surrounded her, wagging their tails. Going down, Bert fell on his side.
His hands went up to his chest. He turned over. He seemed to be digging
with his feet in a kind of half-circle. "Oh oh oh," he cried, little
toots of breath blowing out of him.

Then, nothing.

* * *

Three Voices For A Victim

Wretha Hanson, proprietor of the Franz Bader Gallery, former wife of
George Wiley, someone who knew Bert DeLeeuw almost from the first day he
arrived in Washington in the summer of 1968: "He was unusual for the
movement, really. Activists tend to be opinionated. Assertive, if not
outright aggressive. They love to argue, they have high energy. Bert had
all the commitment of the classic activist but not the classic
temperament. I think of him essentially in those early years as quiet.
That's the word that most sticks. He was capable of the kind of
consuming attention the movement required . . . Whatever expressions of
ego and assertiveness you get in the later Bert DeLeeuw, I still say --
compared to what? I do think that as these losses mounted, then the
personal needs increased. You see, as long as things in the movement
were going reasonably well and you could take some measure of
satisfaction in what you were doing -- certainly not a payoff in terms
of money or influence -- you didn't need the 'I.' But as the movement
fails, as there doesn't really seem a place for you here anymore, the
needs for personal assertiveness seem to grow larger. At least this is
what makes sense to me. And it may not be that at all. I'm just making
this up, really. I never saw Bert behave in ways I couldn't understand.
And I miss him terribly."

Randall DeLeeuw, Manhattan graphic artist, third of the four DeLeeuw
children, the sibling closest in spirit and companionship to the eldest
child: "Actually, I was more counterculture than he was. I came along
four years later. With us, it was lifestyle, not political stance. With
Bert's generation, it was counterculture with the strong political
orientation . . . I remember there was this loft in New York. It
belonged to a woman friend of Bert's. He was between marriages, I guess.
We all used to stay there, and in this one period he'd been staying
there for a couple weeks or longer, and anyway he came out to Green
Pond, and, well, this loft was absolutely crawling with cockroaches, and
here's my mother, Evelyn, just aghast that he'd brought home all these
damn roaches . . . I think it's true Bert sometimes lost his peripheral
vision. Maybe he could be a little self-righteous at times. I think
sometimes his idealism just got in the way of -- what? Life. But then,
after the argument was over, there'd be Ping-Pong down in the basement,
the breaking out of the beers. That was one of the best things about
him. He could get over it."

Jim Crawford, organic guru of a group of Washingtonians who've gone
to Pennsylvania to work the earth. Crawford's been farming without
pesticides since the early '70s. He only knew the later Bert, the more
aggressive Bert: "If he grew lettuce one time, then he was the
definitive lettuce grower. That was definitely one of his prime traits.
Acting and being an expert on whatever he was involved in. Really, he
was an expert. He could pull it off. Yeah, you could resent his
confidence at times. Yeah, you could sometimes think he was an
egomaniac. But, I don't know, it was . . . forgivable. You just liked
the guy. Despite the ego, he was always willing to change his opinion.
Making a consensus, that was Bert. It's hard to explain somebody like
that. Because he had this big ego and was very opinionated, but, I don't
know, he had a way of not confronting you at the same time. So, okay,
here's this young guy with so much talent who comes into this abandoned
old place that had never been anything, and he starts to improve it. And
this other guy has to watch all this success, watch him get elected to
the township, people loving him and praising him. This guy across the
road is filled with resentment against everyone. And here your
neighbor's just gotten married and has this beautiful child and here are
all these beautiful crops coming in. And he just can't stand it. You
know, I think the dog thing just focused Robb." At the end of last May,
right after the preliminary hearing, a letter was received at the
offices of the Altoona Mirror, the region's largest newspaper. It was an
odd letter, and you would have sworn it was written by an illiterate
person. There were half-sentences and unfinished thoughts. The letter
was sent to a reporter who'd been making inquiries into the story.

"As you may have heard, I killed a man accidental as he ran into
where I was shooting to scare hell out of him," the letter writer said.
"This is unbelievable I could walk or Vera on the back fields and woods,
which regularly did, till this pack became killers . . ." The letter
went on for a while in this vein, and included talk about a person "who
flies the red flag in May."

It was signed George W. Robb.

* * *

He has thin dark wet hair combed straight back. He has thick greasy
spectacles. He has pale hands, with slender and almost ladylike fingers
that you might guess once held bundles of letters, but certainly not
post-hole diggers. He has on white tennies, no socks, loose-fitting
trousers, a blue prison shirt ripped open at one shoulder. He's wearing a
hear- ing aid.

A while ago, when the guard frisked him, this bulky and sickly
seeming old man, who has a shaving cut on his cheek, who has a shuffle
to his walk, turned and obediently spread his hands against the wall
while the guard began going up and down his pant legs.

On the way into the interview, Fred Schnarrs, the warden at the
Huntingdon County Jail, had mentioned how much the prisoner loves to
talk. "Half the time it's way above my head," the warden had said. "Law,
politics, Constitution, whatever. Scholarly." But oddest thing, when
things are put in writing, it's almost as if a third-grader were at
work.

Bill Robb is seated at a table, hands folded. He's been using words
like "disallow" and "knowingly." In the beginning he'd seemed quite
neighborly, polite, evenhanded, fair-minded. It's true that it had been
pretty much of a monologue at the beginning, with the prisoner seeming
to be covering the entire history of game laws and dog control in the
state of Pennsylvania.

A reporter had scribbled, choosing not to interrupt.

"We got along," Robb had said at the start. "We did everything
possible for them. We loaned him a car. He used our deepfreeze for three
years. He'd go to the shore in Jersey and catch a lot of blues -- I
don't care for them. I think somebody gave him a piece of venison once,
and he put it our deepfreeze. That sort of thing."

Later: "He broke all the dog laws and all the game laws in the state
of Pennsylvania. I talked to numerous game wardens. {Bert} said, 'I
don't give a damn if they run all over the valley.' Being a man of civil
rights as he was, he violated everybody else's civil rights. They had
to shout at them anytime anybody pulled up. I said, 'Bert, these dogs
are getting out of control.' "

Increasingly now, a mood is turning. There is a hard set to a man's
jaw, some- thing alarming in his eyes. All the talk is now about Bert
DeLeeuw's "violent anger."

DeLeeuw's dogs once attacked him, the prisoner says. Nobody knows
this. They went after the quail he was trying to raise.

Bert's reply? "So what, Bill?"

A reporter, trying to edge it toward May 2, asks him if he said
before the gun went off, "I'm really sorry I have to make Chloe
fatherless."

He removes his glasses, leans across the table, studies the
transcript of the preliminary hearing.

"That's an entirely false statement." The paper in his hand is
trembling.

A reporter informs him that Lina says she heard him say, "Sorry about
that, old buddy."

"Oh, my God, no. No no no. If you wouldn't shoot a man's dogs, why
would you shoot the man?"

Then: "I fired to the side of the man to scare him because he was
attacking me. That's all I did. He ran into the shot."

Robb now says that Bert had a weapon that day.

A reporter asks him what weapon.

"Some kind of digging weapon."

A reporter asks him what happened to this weapon.

Robb says, "Where is it? Where do you think it is? They got rid of
it."

A reporter asks about the night of the arrest, all the things that
were reportedly said at the state police barracks. What about "I shot
Bert"?

The interview is over. A trembling man is trying to get to his feet.
The table is pushed back. The answer to the last question is essentially
this, though the reporter doesn't get it verbatim: "They're lying. Any
cop lies. You know that."

Shuffling off, face deeply crimson, George William Robb, late of the
Hartslog Valley Road, seems no more, no less, than some old, tired,
bent, sockless man consumed by his rage and with nowhere to dump it . . .

* * *

Bert DeLeeuw's funeral service was held on a Sunday afternoon in May.
The weather was tumultuous. Blue Moon Farm had almost never looked so
groomed. The family dogs -- Emma and Sailor and the others -- lay quiet,
dozing on top of one another, until the service started. Then, oddly,
they began barking.

Bert's brother Randy read a moving eulogy. There were psalters and
meditations and prayers and hymns. A picture was handed out of the
deceased in his straw hat and plaid shirt on his blistered Farmall.
Under the photo of the bespec- tacled man on the tractor, who had seemed
to so alter his life from the old days on Dupont Circle when he'd work
half the night and then gobble pizzas at the Trio restaurant, was a poem
by Wendell Berry titled "The Wish to Be Generous." The last line speaks
of "a patient willing descent into the grass."

It was many weeks after that funeral service, after the
pesticide-free squash and peppers and kale and fennel were coming up
just fine at Blue Moon, that Lina Newhouser could force herself to turn
out any of the lights before going to bed. And every time she drove the
half-mile down the bowered lane toward the macadam, Lina had to pass the
spot where it happened. And every time she pulled out onto the main
road, Lina had to notice, at least peripherally, the handsome red brick
colonial house of Bill Robb sitting right across the way.

One night in late summer, Bob Weinswig, the young farmhand from
Wisconsin who'll be a key witness in the case should there be a trial,
woke up cold from his sleep and said to his girlfriend, Sally, something
close to these words:

"He did it on purpose, Sal. Bert did it on purpose, don't you see? He
knew in those last seconds. He turned around on purpose. He started to
turn around so he wouldn't have to see Bill shoot him. And so there'd be
no way Bill could ever say it was an accident."

In the first weeks and months following the shooting, family and
friends were at the farm around the clock. That has tapered off; people
finally have to take care of their own lives. Locally, however, the
response to what happened on this property on May 2 is still amazing. A
dentist has been coming out evenings to help. He just shows up and works
for several hours and sometimes doesn't even run into Lina. People from
all over the valley have come out to volunteer their time -- to pick,
to mow, to paint, to mind Chloe. In the first hours after the shooting,
people were already coming down the lane with groceries, covered dishes,
blankets. In some cases they drove in, put the goods on the table, left
without saying a word.

This past August an auction was held at the local fire hall. Close to
$12,000 was netted. People brought their castoff weed eaters, ice
buckets, their new 8x12 aluminum storage buildings. "People just wanted
to do something," Lina says. "I think the community felt devastated.
Something like this hadn't happened before."

One night toward the end of summer a solicitor from the valley drove
out and said to Lina, "We're all responsible." He didn't elaborate.

And why did the shooting happen at all? It seems impossible to know.

So let a story end like this:

On September 23 of this year, a perfect sky-blue Indian summer day,
about 100 adults and children came together at the Friends meetinghouse
on Florida Avenue in Washington to talk not about the bad dying but the
decent living of Bert Jay DeLeeuw. Bill Robb's name floated into the
room just once, and then only for seconds. The service, which lasted
until long shadows fell on pale windows, brought together people who in
some instances hadn't been in each other's company since the old days of
the movement. To an outsider, it seemed entirely fitting that such a
memorial service, originally planned for the main rooms, had to be
transferred to the basement: The upstairs part of the meetinghouse,
where there is such fine old wood, wasn't available that day. But why
not the basement? This was a group that had fought its battles from
literal and figurative basements. This was a group that had hardly ever
come in first in the race, though what did that matter.

Bert Sr. and Evelyn of Green Pond sat in a front row. So did Lina and
Chloe.

Tim Sampson, who'd thought up the phrase "Robin Hood was right" and
who'd come in from California, led the service. He said: "Death in our
culture is never a natural event even when it's natural. And when it's
unnatural, it accentuates the mystery, the anger, the hurt."

Barry Commoner, down from Brooklyn, spoke next. His hair is
completely white. It's possible to hear voices in your mind, he said,
and for some reason the only voice he can hear from 1980 is Bert
DeLeeuw's. "The reason, for me, I think, is that Bert was an antidote
for everything about that campaign that was inhuman. Bert was the one
who in the midst of the frenzy was calm. I hear Bert's voice as the
theme of that year." A social scientist hardly known for his emotion
then bit his lip. Commoner said he is lucky enough to have a constant
reminder in his home of DeLeeuw's life. "Bookshelves. And I want you to
know they're damn good bookshelves."

Somebody else got up. "Truth is, a lot of the stuff we worked on,
about half of it, was crazy. But it was the other half that was
near-brilliant that made it worth doing."

Somebody told a story about the tent stakes Bert DeLeeuw once set out
for an encampment "behind the Reagan ranch."

It was as if, through its self-conscious laughing and outright
crying, a people was seeking clues to the meaning of its own life.

"I've spent the summer missing him," somebody said.

"What I like to think about his farming is that it gave him yet
another chance to shake the status quo," somebody said.

At the end there was a tune with rollicky gospel in it. This is the
refrain: "Soon and very soon/ We are going to change this world."

Paul Hendrickson, a writer for The Post's Style section, last
wrote for the Magazine about trout fishing.

Further

Almost everyone hates Indiana's egregious "religious freedom" law - cue fierce backlash from businesses, churches, states, cities, legal experts and unhateful Hoosiers - but the most creative response came from an enterprising libertarian who delightedly used his new religious freedom to found the First Church of Cannabis - "One Toke, One Smile, One Love" - aimed at "celebrating all that is good in our hearts." His goal: "A House of Hemp Built with Love," and presumably lots of munchies.